A teenage explorer discovered an ancient clawed tooth belonging to an American mastodon in Missouri

Ira Johnson is an 18-year-old explorer living in Missouri who made an amazing discovery while walking along the Great River – discover a fossilized tooth for animals.

Johnson noticed a “large rock” near the water that seemed to be out of the ordinary and when he took it home, he realized it was an old tooth.

The researchers who analyzed the remains say they belonged to an American Mastodon that lived during the Pleistocene Epoch about 10,000 years ago.

Mastodons are ancient relatives of elephants and mammoths that were thought to have been destroyed by humans, but recent DNA testing shows that they became extinct long ago.

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Johnson shares a love of treasure hunting with his father, and has been exploring rivers since he was about 5 years old.

“I usually find silver-coated spoons or just a bunch of really scrap,” Johnson told FOX2now.com.

“When I was there looking and I went to the water’s edge and saw the tooth and I didn’t think much of it because it looked like an ordinary rock.”

Johnson discovered the tooth, thinking it was just a rock, and brought it home to show his father his “shiny face.”

A tooth is roughly the same size as a human hand, and researchers at the University of Iowa have confirmed that it belongs to an American mastodon.

Another young explorer discovered the jaws of a mastodon on a farm in southern Iowa last year.

A row of teeth still attached to the bone is the second fossil to be discovered on the farm in the past 30 years.

It is thought to belong to a young member of a prehistoric animal who may have reached seven feet in height and lived in ancient Iowa about 34,000 years ago.

These are the second mastodon fossils in 30 years at the site, and the last one discovered by the couple who own the farm while hunting on the property.

They handed over the new bones to the University of Iowa (UI) and asked to remain anonymous so that the paleontologists would not visit their properties.

The remains are now kept in a locker at Trowbridge Hall at the University of Iowa.

These remains are fairly common, especially along waterways in Iowa, said Tiffany Adren, Collections Manager at UI’s Fossil Repository.

We were notified two weeks ago that someone had found a fossil in the middle of a small river on the property.

Actually it was a high school student who found the piece, and the landlords called and informed us [and] Send us pictures.

She added, “Now we can immediately say it was the jawbone of a lawn.”

Ms Adrian said these discoveries are more common than people think.

“I think people find things all the time,” she said.

They may be paddling or bank fishing. Farmers, especially, on the ground can spot things quite easily.

UI’s Paleontology Repository contains a number of prehistoric fossils from Iowa, many of which are large mammals that lived in the last 150,000 years.

These include sloths, beavers, and short-faced bears, as well as camels.

While it was traditionally believed that mastodons roamed regions in the Arctic and sub-Arctic when they were covered by ice caps, scientists now believe that the area was only a temporary habitat for the animals when the climate was warm.

The favorite habitat of megafauna from forests and wetlands is abundant with leafy food.

It also disappeared before humans colonized the area, according to radiocarbon dating of mammalian fossils.

The results indicated that mastodon animals had suffered local extinctions for several tens of thousands of years before any human colonization – their earliest estimate was between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago.

They also hinted that the creatures died before the appearance of climate changes at the end of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, when they were among the 70 species of mammals completely disappearing in North America.